Apple adds HPC customer but falls from Top500

June 22, 2004, 07:59 AM —  IDG News Service — 

Apple Computer Inc. took a step forward and a step backward Monday in its quest to prove itself a viable player in the world of high performance computing (HPC).

The Cupertino, California, computer vendor announced a deal with U.S. Army contractor Colsa Corp. to build a 1,566-node supercomputer that is expected to be capable of as many as 25 trillion mathematical operations per second, according to Colsa.

Called MACH 5 (Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonic research), the US$5.8 million system is designed to do aero-thermodynamic modeling for the Army's Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center. It is expected to be operational by November and, if it were benchmarked today, would rank just behind the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center's $350 million Earth Simulator, Colsa said.

At the same time, an Apple-based supercomputer at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which has 1,100 nodes and rocketed to third place last November in the semi-annual Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, failed to appear on a revised version of the list that was published Monday, leaving Apple unrepresented on the Top500.

Virginia Tech, which was Apple's first entry into the top echelons of the world's supercomputers, was unable to submit a benchmark because it is in the process of building a new supercomputer, based on Apple's latest rack-mounted server, the Xserve G5, according to Alex Grossman, director of server and storage hardware at Apple.

Virginia Tech announced plans to migrate its supercomputer to the Xserve G5 in January, just months after it was built. The university has subsequently dismantled its original system, which was based on the desktop Power Mac G5 system, Grossman said.

The Xserve G5 met with some shipping delays earlier this year, but the dual processor systems that Virginia Tech plans to use have been shipping in volume since April, Grossman said.

"We have a lot more customers to come that will be on the Top500 list, we believe," Grossman said.

One such customer will be Colsa, which expects to run the Top500's Linpack benchmark on the MACH 5 in time for the November list, according to Antony DiRienzo, executive vice president at Colsa. Colsa will take its first truckload of 300 dual-processor Xserve G5 systems next week, DiRienzo said.

The Virginia Tech system has attracted considerable media attention, but some supercomputer users say that Apple has yet to prove that its computers can do more in high performance computing than run benchmarks.

"All I've seen are Linpack benchmarks, and that's not why we buy computers," said Scott Studham, manager of computer operations with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Molecular Science Computing Facility. "The science impacts of these systems still haven't been demonstrated, and the fact that they disappeared from the most recent Top500 list tells me that the first system didn

IDG News Service

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

jfruh
Apple syncing patent can't come soon enough

pasmith
New Twitter features borrow from 3rd party clients

Esther Schindler
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process

mikelgan
How to set up continuous podcast play on the new iTunes

David Strom
Five important Windows 7 mobility features

sjvn
Guard your Wi-Fi for your own sake                        

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Grepping on Whole Words

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace